Bryan Christy, an investigative journalist accomplished an incredible feat by tracking down Ivory tusk smugglers in Africa.

An NPR report reveals how Christy found a way of uncovering the secretive route of the smugglers by embedding GPS trackers in fake Ivory tusks, which he got made by a taxidermist. Speaking to NPR Fresh Air's Terry Gross, Christy suggested that the tusks were no less than real investigators. "These tusks ... operate really like additional investigators, like members of our team, and almost like a robocop," he said.

The crew tracked the route of smugglers moving from Congo's Garamba National Park to Sudan. The journalist also revealed that a lot of the smuggled goods are actually taken to China, which is the biggest market for ivory.

"China is the biggest consumer of illegal ivory. ... Just a few years ago [China] purchased 60 tons of ivory from Africa, and it was that purchase that unleashed the notion that ivory is on the market again," he said.

The journalist employed all the tools of technology available to us today, also detailing how he used Google Earth to follow that tracks of the smugglers:

"We're going to send them into a part of the world where it's too dangerous for us to go. And we inserted them originally on a path we knew to be the path that ivory takes out of Garamba National Park on its way north into Sudan. ... We watched it go from country to country north. It was extremely exciting to watch this idea, this creative idea, could we do it, march north, avoiding all roads as it moved north toward Sudan."